Jeffrey Root

Research Interests I am not currently engaged in any research, and have not been since the beginning of my association with Tacoma Community College, which does not have the resources to fund research. However, I have conducted or been associated with several projects in the past, and can of course speculate on a project that I would chose given an opportunity. Here I will summarize these past projects and append discourses on the more involved inquiries.

The simplest organization is historical.

As an undergraduate I chose as a thesis project, at the request of my spouse who worked for the Pierce County Health Department at that time, the analysis of arsenic in human milk, with emphasis on speciation. Samples were provided by local recent mothers, some who were life-long North End residents growing up in the shadow of the ASARCO smelter, and some who grown up in Hawaii. I worked at this project for three semesters and a summer, right up until I graduated.

Immediately upon graduation I began working for Nalley's Fine Foods, which at that time was providing food science R&D to twenty-odd companies under the parent company umbrella. Over the five years at that position I participated in research on the analysis of several vitamins, sulfites, capsicum, monosaccharides in stored potatoes, and lactic acid in pickles, all by HPLC methods; also the analysis of water activity in salad dressing, the use of NMR to quantify water in beans, the packaging of microwave popcorn, and a very frustrating search for a "ghost" in the steam lines that erased expiration date codes. A separate project was the synthesis of several radio-labeled glucoside polyesters, intended for fat substitutues, for murine feeding studies and organ uptake analysis.

I left Nalley's to attend graduate school at the University of Washington. While there I conducted some research directed towards the characterization of the ligand field around the nickel center of the hydrogenase enzyme. I attempted the synthesis of a pentadentateamino-thioether ligand by thiirane ring-opening; however, the multiplicity of products prevented significant progress by the time I graduated.

Of all these projects, I will detail the arsenic analysis, monosaccharide analysis, the glycoside synthesis, the nickel ligand and the "ghost". I would be happy to respond to any inquiry about any of the other projects mentioned.